Twitter: Twitter is a beautiful, magical bird trapped in the body of a Web site by a jealous underworld demigod. The billion billionth time that Twitter is refreshed, the bird will return to her original form and ascend to the sky, borne aloft by a billion billion joules of subtweets.
She will then fly back to her nest and roost, for she has been deprived of contact with her egg for eleven years. In a cruel symbolic gesture, “egg” icons on Twitter long stood for absence or anonymity. The “faceless man” icon that recently replaced the egg is further cruelty, symbolic of not doing anything about a toxic user base.
Tumblr: Tumblr is a bottomless pit, neither good nor evil. In one version of the myth, Tumblr is a reservoir of original unfinished creation. The rest of the Internet is irrigated by rivers and streams of human attention that flow from Tumblr.
Some chthonic texts written during the early-to-mid aughts characterize Tumblr as a portal to the underworld. On the upside, the realm contains an archive of excellent artsy porn made by four young Australians who share the account onlinecutie.
Facebook: In a terms-and-conditions page recovered and translated in 2011, an encrypted sub-footnote characterizes each Facebook profile as an immortal, non-corporeal entity, transcending what many Western and Eastern mythologies identify as the metaphysical self.
In some variants of the myth, that profile is given a higher spiritual value than the life of its owner. Some obscure texts on the subject contain anecdotes of individuals whose souls have ascended to Heaven after their Facebook profiles, only to find their spots already occupied.
Pinterest: Pinterest, according to one Sumerian ur-narrative, was created by a clique of four disconsolate, yelling gods whose voices have been likened by modern scholars to that of Billy Eichner.
Snapchat: One recorded history of Snapchat’s origins describes “a void whose voidness was not fun enough.” Several demigods who usually resented collaboration but decided to go with it this one time came up with a solution: instead of just a plain, vanilla void, an infinite stream of meaning-objects would be infinitely created and extinguished.
The demigods decided that this would be much more interesting—with the entire world as audience, this procession would make the deep, same-y void less same-y, more different-y. And would lose a bunch of money in the process.
